142 thoughts on “Spoiler Warning S5E11: Khaaaaaans!”

I succeeded in killing Victor in Goodsprings. Oddly enough his weapons didn’t fire, so apparently that is your only chance to do so. Unfortunately upon getting to Vegas he is still there outside the Lucky 38 (with a similar story to Yes Man as to why he isn’t dead).

Correct. When you kill him, he still appears everywhere he normally spawns, for whatever reason. On my first playthrough, I killed everything in the nearby vicinity after selling all my junk. Killing Victor four times was.. weird. Also failed approximately one quest per three named NPCs.

Inspired by the first episode(s) of this season, I started a new playt-hrough and sided with the Powder Gangers to see what it was like. During the battle in Goodsprings, I killed Victor. He showed up on schedule at the next plot point. I chose the “Gah! How are you even here?” dialog option and he explained that if he gets killed by anything he downloads into any convenient securitron. “It’d be mighty useless to only have one body.”

And there were no hard feelings at all about me killing his previous body. Plot immortality lets you take the moral high-road.

I think it depends on when you kill him… I did it after I was done with Goodsprings. On another playthrough I killed him first thing and he showed up with the “you should be careful” speech on the road to Primm, without the option to be freaked out by his being alive.

It’s not wierd that Victor re-spawns, well ok it is at first until you realize he is just a program that can change securitron bodies. I personally loved it when he died and came back in the next town like nothing had happened. You can even bring it up, it makes him creepy at least to me, and it made me distrust him because now I knew I was being followed by him for some unknown reason.

I love his response to you saying that you’re the courier that Benny shot… Even if it is little more than an excuse to give him plot armour at least they bothered to explain it unlike Bethesda (and it does actually make sense).

On my first playthrough when I got to New Vegas I ignored Victor and did other stuff, then later I went to visit Mr. House, only to be attacked by all the securitrons.
It took me forever to realize that there was a dead securitron outside(might have been Victor), apparently a victim of an earlier firefight.
I was marked as a permanent enemy of Mr. House and was really annoyed because I didn’t know what the sides where yet and I had lost any opportunity to join that one.

The rational of them letting me do the negotiating in my game was because I was wearing the hat from Boone’s quest so he was probably thinking “One of my armies elite sniper commandos wants to go in and ‘negotiate.'” Also, if I can speech check the Khans into letting the hostages go, I’m probably convincing enough to persuade him to let me negotiate.
Also, I missed the head spear moment because I was eating chocolate pie.
Ok everyone, it’s that time again! DRINK!

I am reminded of an interview with Neil Gaiman where he tells an anecdote of meeting a publisher who finds himself incredibly bored by the fact he writes “comic books”. When finding out WHAT he wrote, the man finds himself incredibly interested and exclaims “Ah, but you don’t write comics. You write graphic novels!” He describes it feeling like a prostitute who had just been called a lady-of-the-night.

I know Mumbles was just messing around, but it still left a bad taste in my mouth…

Graphic novels are typically one shots that aren’t distributed in serial form whereas comic books are associated with a series. Neither has more artistic merit than the other, but graphic novels are generally easier for outsiders to read since they don’t have to follow an overarching series. It’s absolute bullshit that people both use the word incorrectly and as a tool to give comic books a bad stigma.

Yeah, I just explained it. I don’t give a fuck if everyone already knew the difference.

But frequently the titles trotted out as good examples of “graphic novels” aren’t even good examples of that definition. Watchmen was originally published serially. Maus was originally published serially and is a non-fiction memoir–would you really call it a novel? But on the other hand, Charles Dickens wrote many of what are considered the best novels in the English language, and yet most of them were originally published serially.

The lack of consistency in definition is why I avoid the term “graphic novel” like the plague, and just call everything comics.

The definition of the term “Graphic Novel” has been up for debate for eons… But I have seen it used as a pretentious excuse FAR more than I’ve seen it used to differentiate a miniseries from an ongoing…

In the end, it means what you want it to mean. As I said, I know you were joking and didn’t mean it that way at all, it’s just the kind of anecdote that struck a cord with me and I was reminded of it…

Speaking as a librarian, there’s a technical difference that’s ignored by most publishers to better market collected trade editions of comic books to bookstores and libraries. I’ve seen “graphic novel” applied to non-fiction comic books. While that’s not wrong in the strictest sense of the word, nobody in the present day ever refers to a non-comic memoir, historical narrative or journalistic account as a “novel”.

While he’s written a few graphic novels, most of Gaiman’s work in the industry–especially the noteworthy stuff–is actually comic books. Personally, I just call them all “comics”, hoity-toity nomenclature be damned.

We were in Chicago for the Comic Con YEARS ago. Wasting some time before (or after, who cares) dinner we stop at a Borders and just look around. I find an entire rack of the Absolute Kingdom Come (If you don’t know, Kingdom Come is a future DC story about the end of the world, involving Superman/Batman/etc coming back to deal with the ultra violent new gen of heroes and villains. The Absolute version is a reprint with annotations and all sorts of extras).

Not amusing in its own, until you notice that it was the New NON-FICTION rack it had taken over…

I once found Victor dead, north of Novac and alongside the road. I don’t know what killed him, as there weren’t any other corpses nearby, but the only monsters in the area were giant ants. Considering he apparently got mauled by insects without managing to kill any of them, I’m kinda surprised to learn he has any combat effectiveness at all…maybe he just gets a big damage bonus vs. the player?

I get the sense he does silly/crazy/stupid things just for the entertainment value of the show, or just “because he feels like it” and he’s already played the game through so it’s not like he has any reason to strive for perfection.

Pretty much my thoughts.. still doesn’t help getting irked about it at times. I laughed a little when I realized that that at least part of the reason he’s going to get Cass must be because of her unique perk.

And now thinking about it, can’t really think of anybody else who Reginald would voluntarily hang out with out of all the (non-robot) companions than the fellow alcoholist in arms.

You guys make light of the fact that Reginald is able to consume vast quantites in a blink of an eye during a fight (and also repair weapons in this case), but I don’t think that’s actually how it works. If you have the radio on when you brink up the Pip-Boy, it continues to play, which indicates that time hasn’t stopped; I think the Pip-Boy just freezes all living things around the user so you’re able to have a leisurely meal. It all makes perfect sense if you’re willing to think about it.

I’m genuinely not sure which is the more ridiculous justification. If the time it takes to heal is the time Reginald is eating them, that means he’s eating and drinking multiple things at once while engaging in a fight. Maybe he has a huge mouth and just crams everything in there at once and is able to swallow it piece by piece.

Oh yeah, I hadn’t even thought about that. During the Khan firefight, not only did Reginald stop to stuff his mouth full of drinks and food, he also combined the parts of three more or less broken submachine guns to make one in a good condition…

The problem comes when trying to rationalise the systems of a game with turn-based combat in a real-time setting. Turn-based combat is inherently an abstraction of temporality. It only makes sense within the context of its own defined rules. When bringing that into real-time, it’s inevitable you’re going to run into problems with justifying aspects of gameplay. You can either accept them or go back to turn-based combat, where the player’s imagination can fill in the blanks.

Of course, the previous Fallouts barely had any food or drink, and in most cases it served almost no purpose except for fleshing out the world. Most had no effect, and while some would heal the player, it was limited enough to avoid the “player opens inventory and eats 30 croissants” problem. This could have been easily avoided by simply making food either wholly cosmetic in function, or relating it to some sort of hunger/stamina system rather than health.

He just has a unique play style when it comes to most games featured on Spoiler Warning. Based on what I saw and heard in the TF2 special, he’s quite good at his preferred genre(s). He’s very good at shooting in games where it depends on player skill. He gets thrown off when the game enforces character stat based inaccuracy.

Only because of Spoiler Warning, I played Mass Effect 2 again as a Vanguard, because it looked so fun when Josh did it. Was way better than the typical “duck, wait until enemy comes up, shoot, duck, wait until…” playstyle.

Well, for one we can both argue whether or not that constitutes “being bad at videogames” until the sun goes out. So let’s not get into that.

But if you’ve watched the previous seasons, then you ought to know by now that Spoiler Warning isn’t about showing of an “expert” playthough. It’s more about taffing about and getting into various hijinks.

Id like to see your attention span when you are playing a speedrun of a game while engaged in a conversation with three other people.

As for the melee build,I had a melee character,but still used energy weapons during the start,because of that plasma pistol I found early on.It was only when I got the rebar that I switched to the weapon I actually leveled.

Fun fact: the 10mm SMG has shotgun-accuracy at best; there’s only one rifle that is less accurate (Automatic Rifle). 9mm SMGs have a notably smaller spread; the Sil and 12.7mms are slightly more accurate. Heck, half of the shotguns have a lower or similar spread.

Shamus has mentioned he’s a crit stacker, which means he probably steam rolls these games his first playthrough. I think the quote is something along the loines of “Josh has once again broken the game over his knee with his melee build.”

He just doesn’t do it because it’s Spoiler Warning. Actually, if you watch the first season, he was ORIGINALLY pushing to be nice and goody two shoes, until Randy took over and went the chaotic-neutral playstyle. It became popular and Josh showed his mastery of it in Fallout 3. Were I to guess, I’m betting he does a “Good” run on his own private playthrough…

Actually that part about khans knowing what deal you made kind of makes sense.If you choose sneak,then they are alert and shoot on sight.But if you choose negotiations,then ncr guys probably wave a white flag or something,and you come in as their spokesman,so they greet you.

Oh,and this episode failed to fulfill the bunnyhop quota,so you need to redo it.

The “Confirmed Bachelor” perk just really bothered me. I’m playing the german version, and Bachelor was translated as “Junggeselle” – someone who is male and single. It doesn’t have the connotations like its english counterpart, so I was really, really weirded out by my character suddenly coming on to guys. I don’t have anything against it, but I would have wished for a better translation. The rest of the game is translated ok, compared to Bethesda & Fallout3 standards, though there are some things that just don’t work that way in german. The worst in my opinion is that one radio comment about the Kings (I think it was about the Kings, at least) that he doesn’t want to see NCR “in the ghetto” and they should “return to sender” and stuff like that – but to keep the reference, they didn’t translate those part of the sentence. It sounds really artificial.

The situation isn’t that much better in English. “Confirmed Bachelor” was a euphemism used about 50 years ago and seldom heard since. I’m sure most people didn’t get what it meant until the saw the resulting dialog options.

The retro-future-50s thing was pretty scaled back in the first two Fallouts, and didn’t refer to culture or social standards so much as it did the way technology branched off (i.e. what if the transistor was never invented and everything ran on vaccuum tubes). It was only with Fallout 3 that Bethesda went whole-hog trying to handle the setting with the care and delicacy of a sledgehammer that the 50s aspects became something glaringly obvious.

Besides, it really does not make much sense for people to be using 50s slang… 200+ years after the Great War, which itself took place well past the 1950s and according to what we know from Fallout 1 and 2, didn’t much resemble the 50s at all outside of aesthetic trends.

I thought it would help me with males. But not that way. I thought “Well, Bachelor is a male single. So he’s probably good when dealing with other male singles, as buddys, drinking beer and watching raiders being shot.” Also, the picture for that perk doesn’t really make sense to me.

I, for one, didn’t get it until my avatar started using homosexual pick-up lines. Though at least historically, the term had some precedence–Cherchez La Femme hasn’t been used to suggest lesbianism anywhere IRL, has it?

No, but it’s kind of a pulp noir thing. “Look for the woman” means that at the root of every problem (case) there is a woman. So it fits in the time period, although the interpretation of the phrase is entirely new. And sort of amusing, in that perspective – suggests that whomever in the Fallout universe started using the phrase that way to imply lesbianism was probably a bitter and angry man. ;)

I don’t think they’ll do Portal 2. Black humour, yeah, but also very scripted and completely about puzzles. Also, there isn’t really much to say about Portal 2 while playing it for several hours. And if Josh hasn’t played it already, chances are he is just going to stand there, looking at a puzzle and thinking about it until he has the solution.

1) Its very hard to buy now.
2) Its a massive pain to get running on modern operating systems.
3) Josh has to be able to run the game, along with a bunch of other stuff. Mainly the feed to Shamus/Ruts/Mumbles, the software he’s using to record when he’s playing, and Ventrillo. All could mess up a game, and with a game like SS2, chances are there’s no way they’d be able to get it to work.

Now if System Shock 2 ever got released on GoG… then things would be different. Most likely.
…

I’m not at all sure about this. My copy runs under Wine on Linux with no problems whatsoever. It was basically a case of installing the DirectX drivers and it works fine. If it runs without problems on a non-native operating system with open source graphics/sound/input drivers, then it should (in theory) have less problems under proper Windows.

> 3) Josh has to be able to run the game, along with a bunch of other stuff.

Not sure exactly what other software is running, but given that this game was running on a single core, 64MB of RAM, DirectX 6 and Nvidia Riva TNT2 card on the system I bought it for, it’s probably not going to take up more resources than your average anti-virus application these days. Well within the capabilities of your average modern machine.

It will install lots of unofficial fixes to problems, and using it, I have never run into any problems at all. It also makes it easier to use mods… speaking of, the SS2 Mod Manager is also great to have.

The only issue I’ve consistently had is getting the videos to play in-game due to the dated codecs they use. For that, you can always try to transcode the videos yourself, download versions in different codecs from elsewhere, or watch them separately from the game. See here:

The also don’t do cold play throughs on Spoiler Warning. Now if Josh played Portal 2 and figured out really odd ways to get through the test tracks, then it might work with the others saying, “No, Josh you need to come back this way.” Only to have him consistently complete the level in the “wrong” way. I don’t know that that’s viable.

Although, it might be interesting to see them take on a game cold. People have mentioned Oblivion (which is really old), but how about planning ahead and try Skyrim at release? Actually get some spoilers in Spoiler Warning.

Well, another option is just a single-parter on the “finer points” of Portal 2 like they did for the execrable Train thing a couple of weeks back. You get all the highlights without sitting through endless hellish trial-and-error solving chamber after chamber. Sort of an extended drunken sarcastathon review thing.. :)

I first thought that might work really good, having just one special episode, but then I thought… there isn’t anything to make fun of or complain about. Amnesia had the drawers and physics and Josh’s… unique kind of playing a horror game, the train game was plain horrible and TF2 had Josh playing various builds and being a good TF2 player… but in portal, there isn’t as much “being good at it”, is there? It’s just playing through the story. There is nothing to complain about, because it’s just awesome.

Assassin’s creed actually has great mechanics for climbing and jumping that should be implemented into every other platformer.Im sad that this,the best thing that from the game in my opinion,went so unnoticed.

I love Assassin’s Creed. There’s a bit of a learning curve on the parkour mechanics, but once you have them down, it’s the most awesome thing ever. Then I go back to something like God of War or Enslaved and feel like I’m playing crippled.

I wonder if the complexity of the engine turns developers off. It did take them two games to go from failed masterpiece to brilliant and innovative.

If I remember, Shamus apparently got bored with Assassin’s Creed II after he managed to get it running/get past the DRM. Not so much out of the game being bad, but just that it didn’t exactly grab him.

I loved Assassin’s Creed II, and Brotherhood adds more lulzy stuff to mess around with (Assassin henchmen, ability to kill people one by one in combat, others).

Barstow is in California, and has already appeared in Fallout (more or less). While the game claims that Necropolis is Bakersfield, based on its location on the map and its relation to Los Angeles, it’s actually Barstow.

Yeah, I was really confused by that. It’s not bothering me to death like it probably is for some people, but it really seemed like Josh was trying to troll us at that point. It seems like he’s adding to every weapon type except energy weapons (which is ironic since he carries around an incinerator), which is a great way to nerf yourself.

I’m doing an unarmed build now… and it breaks the game extremely early. When you can knock out or kill anyone you come across in about 3 punches (with the most basic weapons) it’s almost impossible to die. It might make for some interesting challenges later, but none that won’t be solved by either Boone or a good ballistic fist or displacer glove.

Oh, no, don’t worry, it doesn’t really become much more (read: at all) challenging. I also rolled an Unarmed character, first char actually, and as soon as I hit the Strip I started murdering everything with Sneak Attacks. Went quite smoothly, all things considered. No companion, level 15 give or take, and only one death in the end.

I remember playing Mass Effect as a Biotic, and trying to evenly distribute all my stats except the pistol itself, then only using the pistol the entire game.

It works too, since the pistol was OP in that game.

And when I played FO3, I went melee with energy weapons, putting all my points into speech, then went into the final battle un-armed.

…I had to resort to grenading the final group, because you can’t encounter the final boss without killing them. Then I had to steal their gun and wipe out their mooks.

Of course, doing that in Dragon Age: Origins got a little TOO annoying for me, what with the Deep Roads. I still need to finish the final act of that.

It’d be interesting to see a WRPG developer take on a similar re-spec system as Final Fantasy Tatics (And well…most tatics games, actually) – “got yourself into a bind? No problem! Just re-spec your talents and move on!”*

*You’d still keep your stats still, but re-specing skills is where you’d likely need to spend time anyways.

For the record, I liked New Reno. It had that merchant dude I always killed and got his stuff and the free upgrade dude in the basement and the priest dude who gave you the cheat book and the porn studio (porn is awesome) and the high-tech du..family that gave you the quest with the millitary base.

And Myron. Myron, baby, Myron.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouYsDgA8vKo
One look at this guy and I’m off to erase Arcade from the face of the earth.
Also, is it me or are his facial animations more character-defining than anything you see with FaceFX software.
EDIT#2: just noticed Myron’s voice actor is… Boone. Wow. I’m gonna go lie down for a bit.

New Reno WAS cool… I liked how you could assassinate every mob boss with some care…

My favorite was Bishop, cuz he shot me on sight after I delivered his suitcase. I said “Oh yeah?!?”, slept with his daugther, snuck out, slept with his wife, changed the combination on his safe, snuck out and went to have a beer in Mordino’s casino…

Yahtzee mentioned having fun messing with the hostage quest when he reviewed F:NV. He agreed to negotiate, looted everything while they were waiting for him to talk, and then started a firefight between the Khans and the NCR after he was back behind NCR lines by shooting a Khan. The NCR still rescued the hostages, because they were safe inside that building while the firefight raged outside.

So he wasn’t really needed at all. Seems a bit of a goofy quest if you don’t really contribute much.

opens with bunny-hopping. great. fantastic. clap. clap. clap. oh good, my slow clap program made it in here. seriously, i take it josh doesn’t read these comments. the extra speed from bunny-hopping is insignificant. stop it.